


I've got dreams of love (and I love you)

by ekbelfield



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Prophetic Dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-20
Updated: 2015-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-16 05:46:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4613463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ekbelfield/pseuds/ekbelfield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Felicity Smoak makes choices based on her dreams.  It's not as unwise as it sounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I've got dreams of love (and I love you)

**Author's Note:**

> This idea has been rattling around in my head for awhile. I had an idea for a longer version but I'm not patient enough.
> 
> Title from Gavin DeGraw's Dreams.

When Felicity wakes up, the details of the dream are slipping away, as they always do. She just remembers sitting in some sort of office, across from a man who looks like one of her classmates, but older, telling her “The day you agreed to tutor me was the best day of my life.”

She shrugs it off, since dreams often make no sense, and goes about her day as usual. Until after her science class, when her teacher asks if she’d be willing to tutor a student in chemistry. She’s about to decline, since her computers take up most of her spare time, but the memory of her dream washes over her like a wave, and mid-word her “No” morphs into a “Yes.”

She meets the student in question in one of the lab classrooms, entering the room to see Oliver Queen, a senior with a reputation, nonchalantly leaning against a lab table. He looks her up and down with what can only be described as a leer, and Felicity turns on her heel to march right back out of the classroom. She makes it back to the doorway before she feels a soft hand on her shoulder, turning her around. “I’m sorry. Please. I need to pass chemistry to graduate and I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t need the help.” Felicity looks up into his eyes, sees the sincerity in them. “Okay,” she huffs “but if you turn anything having to do with me tutoring you in chemistry into a pick-up line, I’m gone.” He laughs, which surprises her, and seems to draw a truce between them. She moves over to a lab table and opens her textbook, and he joins her, sitting close but not too close.

She tutors him in chemistry straight through the rest of the year. They didn’t become friends, not really, and there was certainly no jock-sweeps-nerd-off-her-feet fairytale, but he would smile at her when they passed in the hallway and she would make chemistry flashcards for him using brightly colored pens. He passes his chemistry final and graduates with his friends, while she spends the summer building computers and prepping for junior year. He keeps the flashcards.

*

Midway through Felicity’s senior year, she has another dream. It’s a mostly sleepless night for Felicity, as she wrestles with the biggest decision of her life: MIT or Caltech. Both schools were offering generous scholarships with hopes of earning her favor, and honestly how do they expect 18-year-olds to make these sorts of choices? She tosses and turns, but at some point, her waking anxieties meld with her dream. She’s in some sort of basement or warehouse with a state-of-the-art computer set up in front of her. The mystery man is in front of her again, the one who looks like an older version of Oliver, shirtless and puling himself up on a bar. She fist pumps for reasons her dream logic doesn’t provide, and the man drops from the bar and walks over to her.

“Got ‘em” she says “Warehouse on First and Main. Go do your thing.” He smiles at her before moving off behind her to an area cast in shadow. He calls over his shoulder “Going to MIT was the best choice you ever made.” The dream fades away, and when she wakes up, she feels a little silly basing her choice of college on something as trivial as a dream. But it’s better than any other method she has come up with, and it’s not like either one is a bad choice. 

She runs into Oliver Queen at the post office when she mails her commitment letter. He’s mailing a check to the third college he’s going to attend. He smiles at her, like he used to do in the hallway, and she loans him her pen to fill out the address on the envelope he’s using. It’s red. He keeps that too.

*

Felicity is at MIT when she has another dream. This time she knows it’s Oliver, he’s old enough now that she’s certain this is the man he will grow into, paparazzi photos being how she’s seen his growth over the last couple of years. They’re on an island somewhere, it’s bright and sunny and they are on some sort of beach. It’s startling empty, that detail being so incongruous with the Oliver she sees in the tabloids that it stands out to her subconscious brain. 

He’s speaking to her now, his face is so serious, but she’s not listening to the words, just staring into his eyes. A sentence he says filters through. “I always knew I would survive here, Felicity. Even on my worst days, the days that I wished I wouldn’t have survived, I knew I’d make it home. Do you want to know how I knew?” She shakes her head, indicating the negative. It’s at that moment that she startles awake, with enough recollection of the dream to wonder why she didn’t let him tell her. It doesn’t fit with what she knows about herself, how she’s constantly trying to solve mysteries, and the man in her dream certainly appeared to be full of them.

That’s the day that the Queen’s Gambit sinks. Felicity mourns her former classmate, the acquaintance she helped learn chemistry, and tries to shake the feeling that her dream bears more significance than she thinks it does. She can’t talk to anyone about it, because it sounds absolutely crazy whenever she tries to put her thoughts into words, and telling people about her seemingly inconsequential dreams certainly won’t bring Oliver back. So she buries the small flicker of hope that he might still be alive. 

She tries to pretend that her dream isn’t the reason she applies for a job at Queen Consolidated when she graduates. She has her choice of tech conglomerates once her degree is in her hands, but she tells herself it’s homesickness that brings her to the IT department at QC. She feels a pang when she sees the name on the door as she enters work each morning, but that pang drives her to work harder, to honor the boy she knew.

*

When Oliver Queen returns from the dead, all three dreams come flooding back to her at once, and she cries.

When Oliver Queen shows up at her office with a laptop full of bullet holes, he smiles at her like he used to do in the hallway at school. She can’t help herself. “Here for more chemistry lessons?” slips out, unbidden. Before she even has a chance to blush, he replies, “The day you agreed to tutor me was the best day of my life.” She tilts her head at him, confused, before he barrels on, getting down to business.

When Oliver Queen needs her to find some bad guys, she uses her hard earned computer skills. “Got ‘em” she says “Warehouse on First and Main. Go do your thing.” She feels an echo of déjà vu, which gets stronger when he replies “Going to MIT was the best choice you ever made.” She laughs as he grabs his gear. “The best choice I ever made was working my ass off, regardless of where I ended up. Which, I’m still doing by the way.” He grabs his bow before heading for the door, “I know, Felicity. I know.”

When Oliver Queen takes down Slade Wilson, with help from Felicity, he breathes a well-earned sigh of relief. He also thinks it might be time for a confession. “I always knew I would survive here, Felicity.” He pauses, debating how much to tell her. “Even on my worst days, the days that I wished I wouldn’t have survived, I knew I’d make it home. Do you want to know how I knew?” He’s surprised, but also kind of not, when she shakes her head no. She smiles up at him, reaching for his hand to twine their fingers together. “I don’t need you to tell me how you knew you would survive, Oliver, because I already know the answer to that.”

When Oliver Queen sleeps alongside Felicity Smoak for the first time, it’s the best sleep he’s gotten in his life.


End file.
